Positive Youth Development Principles in Practice: How Youth Service Organizations Help Youth Thrive

This open access book tells the story of eight youth service organizations in the USA, using the voices of the impacted youth and the staff who accompanied them. Drawing on a series of structured interviews with young people and staff and informed by positive youth development (PYD), ideas the author proposes nine universal principles for working with youth from under-resourced neighborhoods that can be applied to any youth organization. The principles include orienting youth towards a purposeful future, providing an opportunity to build academic and critical thinking abilities, and developing individual’s identity and sense of agency. The book contributes to the emerging methodology of principles-focused evaluation and draws on range of disciplines including psychology, education and youth studies. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Thrive Foundation.

Peter L. Samuelson (M.Div, Ph.D.) is the former Senior Director of Evaluation and Impact at Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota and the former Director of Research and Evaluation at the Thrive Foundation for Youth, USA. He is co-author, with Ian M. Church, of Intellectual Humility (Bloomsbury, 2017)